Lesson video

Hello there.

My name is Mrs. Dhami.

Thank you for joining me for your Design and Technology lesson today.

Now, the big question for today is what strategies are there for coming up with design ideas? Now, I'm sure you are all thinking, "I can sketch them out." You certainly can, but there are many, many other strategies too.

So, let's explore them together.

Our outcome for today is we will be able to use a range of strategies to create design ideas which avoid design fixation.

We have a few ground rules for our lesson today.

First of all, we need to listen to others.

It is okay to disagree with each other, but we should listen properly before making assumptions or deciding how to respond.

When disagreeing, challenge the statement, not the person.

We need to respect each other's privacy.

We can discuss examples, but do not use names or descriptions that identify anyone, including ourselves.

There is no judgment today.

We can explore beliefs and misunderstandings about a topic without fear of being judged.

And lastly, we can choose our level of participation.

Everyone has the right to choose not to answer a question or join a discussion.

We never put anyone on the spot.

We have five key words for our lesson today.

Design strategy, which is a method of generating ideas.

Design fixation is when we consider only one possible solution.

You're not allowed to do that today.

Innovation, which is when we introduce new or improved ideas.

Design requirements, which are something which is needed or wanted to make a product successful.

And lastly, annotation, which is a comment added to a design to provide explanation, clarification, or extra information.

You are gonna do a lot of those today.

Our lesson will follow to learning cycles today, expanding design thinking, and then moving on to the value of multiple ideas.

Let's get cracking with expanding design thinking.

Let's remind ourselves the theme of this unit is inclusive design, focusing particularly on mental health and wellbeing.

Now, design strategies is one of our keywords today.

A design strategy is a method of generating design ideas.

Design fixation is where the designer only considers one solution.

Avoiding design fixation allows for many exciting possibilities for successful, innovative solutions and solutions that you might not have thought of yourself if you get fixated too much on one design.

We are going to explore a few design strategies for generating design ideas that avoid design fixation.

You are not limited to the design strategies we share.

You might have others that you enjoy using.

Some strategies will be right for your design brief and others will not, and that's okay.

Some design strategies will produce design ideas not created by yourself.

It is extremely important to explain the design strategy and why you chose to use it, but also to attribute the person, or program, or app creating the design.

Annotating is one of our key words today.

Now, annotating design ideas is important to explain how the idea works.

Identify strengths, weaknesses, and potential opportunities to analyze against design requirements.

Design requirements is one of our key words today.

Let's remind ourselves.

It's all about statements that show or tell you what your product or solution must do to be successful.

And then, annotation.

You must record your primary user and stakeholder thoughts.

But stakeholder in purple, can you remember what it means? Have a think.

Pause the video.

Come back to me when you've made, when you've got an answer.

Hopefully, you remembered that stakeholders are people, groups, or organization with an interest in the project.

Now for this unit, some great examples are teachers or perhaps educational psychologists.

One way of generating design ideas is by sketching.

Now, that could be 2D or 3D.

That could be freehand.

That could be isometric or oblique, orthographic, perspective.

It doesn't matter as long as it gets your ideas across.

And here's a beautiful example of freehand sketching.

Now, sketching is a great idea for rapid developments and experimenting with multiple options.

But remember, as you sketch out some ideas, you must annotate them.

And feel free to go back to that slide describing what you need to annotate.

Collaborative designing is a firm favorite in my classroom.

Basically, it is when you get stakeholders, peers, or your family to produce design ideas or even prototypes for or with you.

Take a little look at the example.

I asked my students to design something to respond to a design brief.

They all took a little slip of paper and they all came up with an idea and posted it onto a big board.

Now, these are just a few examples from one of my classes, and you can see they've all come up with completely different ideas to each other, because everybody approaches a design brief and a design problem or opportunity in a different way.

So, why not try and get all of those ways into your design ideas, because you produce far more and you might think of a solution that you've not considered before.

I think it's a great idea.

Now, the stakeholders will need attributing with this, so you can't take claim to all of those design ideas.

And remember, when you collate them all together, remember to look carefully at them, look closely and annotate.

In a similar fashion to collaborative designing is primary user or stakeholder designing.

Now, this is rather than asking a huge group of people, you ask a few people and spend a bit more time with them, whilst they come up with ideas and they explain those ideas to you.

And you can see in this example here, this is one of my students who asked his dad and his grandma to come up with some ideas for him.

And you can see all those absolutely beautiful annotations.

I've got the little reminder down there saying, "Please make sure that you annotate." Again, it's a great strategy, because you may think of a solution that you, well, sorry, they might think of a solution that you had not considered before.

Remember though, they will need attributing 'cause it's not you who actually drew out that design idea.

Jacob says, "I already know what I want to design and what it should look like.

I do not need to bother with any more design ideas." Is Jacob's statement true or is it false? Have a think.

Come back to me when you've got an idea and a reason for your answer.

Well done if you identified that it is false.

And why is that? What were your reasons? You might have said, "Using a range of design strategies ensures that you avoid design fixation and you could discover a design which you had not yet thought of." AI, so artificial intelligence, is becoming a really good way to come up with design ideas too.

Now, you can use word to image where you put in some words in a description to generate an image as a design starting point.

There is also sketch to image, which is great for maybe developing or rendering sketches.

And there's quite often a creativity level, which you can adjust depending on how creative you want AI to be with your words or with your sketches.

However, here's a little warning, please, please be careful with the prompts that you use.

If you are getting an outcome that you are not happy with and doesn't match your design brief, you might need to reconsider that prompt to determine the success of the outcomes.

And just remember, AI applications, be it a website, be it an app, will need attributing.

And I think you know what I might say now, please remember to annotate your images, even if they're by AI, to explain how they work and what your primary user and stakeholders might think of them.

Morphology is a way of generating design ideas by combining different aspects such as function, material, color, or style.

Take a little look at these designs for a plant pot holder.

First one on the left says grey, timber, minimalist, middle one, green, stripes, textile, and natural, and lastly, grey, paper and board, funky.

Look how different all of these outcomes are.

They might produce a great starting point for developing something, but also for producing completely different outcomes for your design ideas.

It might be worth a shot.

So you know what I'm gonna say? If you do do morphology, remember to annotate your designs.

Biomimicry is when we take inspiration from nature for form and/or function.

Let's take hook and loop for example that was inspired by burrs.

Now basically what happened, the person called George de Mestral, hopefully I've pronounced that right, he went for a walk with his dog.

When he got back, he noticed that the burrs had stuck to his clothes, but also to his dog's fur.

So he took one off and he put it underneath a microscope.

And he looked extremely carefully and he saw that there were tiny little hooks on the end of each of the spikes.

And that is what inspired the hook and loop system.

Now, you might have heard of fastskin fabric.

Now, fastskin fabric is used in competitive swimwear, and basically it mimics the skin of a shark, giving a streamlining effect underwater and reducing drag, which is a type of resistance.

You might find some inspiration in nature too.

It's worth a look.

Just remember to annotate your designs.

Bisociation is the technique of connecting two unrelated concepts to produce an even better new idea.

Let's take a look at the cyclone vacuum cleaner.

James Dyson combined the centrifugal force from an extractor with a bagged vacuum cleaner to create the cyclone vacuum cleaner.

Clever.

Remember, if you are combining two different ideas, remember to annotate.

When designing, you might want to take some inspiration from past and present designers.

Now, you could do that by searching on the internet.

You could also do it by visiting shops or museums. Let's take a little look at a few examples that relate to this unit.

So, you could search up design firm IDEO, who helped develop the Kooth app.

Now for those of you who have not seen the Kooth app, basically it's a mental health support app that has live chats with counselors.

It's you can do personal journaling on it, and it also includes self-help articles.

Then we move on to Alessi.

Now, Alessi, you might be thinking, "Why has Mrs. Dhami put that into this lesson?" Well, I'm sure you've all come across Alessi products, and if you haven't, make sure that you do an internet search because they are brilliant.

But the great thing about Alessi is you look at a product and you don't necessarily know what it is straight away.

And that's the same with this toilet brush.

It actually looks like a plant pot with a cactus inside.

And you take it out and it's a toilet brush.

But perhaps when we are designing wellbeing products for mental health, perhaps it might be that you want to design something that looks like something else.

So, that's not obvious that it's a wellbeing product 'cause quite often people don't want to associate a product with something.

Sometimes people like to keep that a little bit quiet and perhaps you could be inspired by Alessi for that.

And then lastly, it would definitely be worth looking at the designer, Don Norman.

He is the pioneer of user centered design.

And basically, he said that design should make things understandable, intuitive, and usable, which fit perfectly with this design unit.

So please get searching, get being inspired Get being inspired then to create some wonderful design ideas.

Just remember, you need to make sure that you are annotating those wonderful design ideas.

Reverse engineering is a great way to come up with design ideas.

So reverse engineering is when you take something apart to understand the components, identify what could be eliminated, what could be taken out, and to help you rethink products.

And you can see two beautiful reverse engineering for the hot glue and the watch disassembly.

Now Laura says, "Remember to check with an adult before you take something apart," especially in case it is dangerous.

And as you do, make sure that you annotate your design thinking and use that to produce some design ideas.

Time for a quick check-in.

Which design strategies may require you to attribute someone or something? Is it a AI, b reverse engineering, c primary user designing, or d collaborative designing? Have a think.

Pause the video.

Come back to me when you've made your decision.

Well done if you got a, c, and d.

So AI, primary user designing, and collaborative designing all need you to attribute someone or something because it was not yourself who produced the design idea.

Onto Task A.

Part 1, define design strategy.

Part 2, define design fixation.

And lastly, part 3, choose four different design strategies and explain how they can be used to avoid design fixation and potentially produce innovative ideas.

Good luck.

Come back to me when you've got some great answers.

Part 1, design strategies are methods of generating design ideas.

Part 2, design fixation is when only one possible solution is considered and designers get stuck on one idea or rely too heavily on existing solutions.

Part 3, I asked you to explain how four different design strategies can be used to avoid design fixation and potentially produce innovative ideas.

So you might have chosen collaborative designing, because it enables others to create designs to meet your design brief, ideas that potentially you have not thought of.

AI encourages varied thinking and new combinations.

Biomimicry takes inspiration from nature for form and/or function.

And prototyping using modeling materials such as toy bricks allows designers to visualize quickly in 3D.

These strategies discourage design fixation and allow the possibility of more innovative ideas to be generated.

Onto learning cycle two, the value of multiple ideas.

Izzy says, "Why is it important to create more than one design idea?" Pause the video, have a think, have a little discussion.

Tell the person sat next to you or tell me and come back to me when you have considered it.

Hopefully, you've come up with some great reasons why it is important to have more than one design idea.

Jacob says, "To avoid design fixation and create multiple ideas." Aisha says, "You might miss out on amazing idea that you had not considered." And Sofia says, "You might not have considered all of your design requirements." These are all great points for why it's important to create lots and lots of design ideas.

Izzy says, "I need to use all the design strategies when producing my design ideas." Is her statement true or is it false? Have a think.

Come back to me when you've made your decision.

Well done if you got false.

And why is that? You do not need to use all the design strategies.

Choose a mixture of design strategies that are right for your design brief, and they might be different to the person sat next to you.

Let's remind ourselves about what we already know in this unit.

We have Alex.

Now, Alex is a 16-year-old secondary school student.

He's currently preparing for his GCSE exams. He lives at home with family and spends most evenings revising.

Does that sound like you? Stressor, he has exams and workload.

Barriers, he has stress and anxiety.

And the impact of this is increased feelings of pressure.

So, we said the design opportunity is either to design something to help him relax or organize his tasks.

It's a good idea at this point to remind yourself of your design brief.

Izzy says this, "Design an innovative solution to enable teenagers to calmly approach exam revision at school or home so that they do not feel overwhelmed and are able to focus on the revision productively." Let's take a little look at what Izzy has thought of for design strategies for her design brief.

She's identified it needs to be for teenagers, so she thinks, "Right, I'm gonna do some collaborative design with other teenagers." She then says, "It needs to be used at school or home." So, she's gonna get some stakeholders to produce some design ideas for her.

And more specifically, she's gonna ask her teachers, but also parents.

And lastly, Izzy thought, "Do you know what? I'm gonna have a go at AI for a mixture of alternative ideas too." Izzy started with collaborative design.

So, Izzy asked her Oak GCSE D&T group to produce a range of annotated design ideas to help Alex stay calm when revising in school.

And these are a few of her class' ideas that she has collated.

We'll take a closer look on the next slide.

Let's zoom into this idea.

You can probably tell it is a tie and it's something that slots into the back of the tie to provide textures.

Izzy said, Izzy loved the idea of something that could slot onto the back of the tie, so then it could be discreet while allowing easy access to a variety of textures whenever a student was feeling anxious.

Izzy also loved this idea by one of her classmates.

It's basically something that could clip onto a button of the shirt, which is behind the tie.

Again, being discreet, but allowing access to a variety of textures.

Two beautiful ideas that Izzy hadn't considered before.

Izzy then decided she would have a go at stakeholder designs where she got stakeholders to come up with ideas for her.

So, Izzy asked a variety of teachers from different subjects to come up with annotated ideas for how students could revise at home.

And there's a few beautiful ideas here.

We'll zoom into one on the next slide.

Izzy loved D&T teacher's idea of a revision timer to set yourself goals.

Take a little closer look.

If you notice all around the circle at the bottom, there are timer buttons and you press those down for however many minutes you want to choose to time you while you are revising.

It's also got a lovely little storage tub for stationary or randomized prizes as this teacher has put as little rewards throughout revision.

So as I've put here, the student could select a particular time and see it count down to keep focused on the task for an achievable amount of time.

What a beautiful idea.

Carrying on with the stakeholder theme, Izzy asked her dad to come up with an annotated design idea to help Alex relax in an evening.

Take a little look, it's a jar.

And inside, there are lots of little bits of rolled up paper.

You unroll one of those, you unwind it, and that gives you an idea of something to do to relax and switch off from revision.

And then, you can see inside the lid to the jar is a color changing light, so that you can make the jar into a light and relaxing mood light too.

Izzy loved the idea, picking a random positive idea for Alex to reward himself after revising whilst combining with a soothing color changing light.

What a lovely idea.

Izzy then used AI to come up with a few design ideas for her, and she had to experiment with the prompts to see what she could come up with.

So, one of the ideas that she quite liked from AI was something that kind of locked her phone in place to reduce the temptations of social media while she was revising.

Then using music, a calming coloring book, and a timer that sets achievable time limits.

Izzy liked the idea of this for herself, but she also liked the idea of it for Alex too to help calm his anxiety.

Four completely different design ideas produced by AI, and only one of them was actually reproduced with her stakeholder and collaborative designing, which was the timer.

The other three, those ideas had not been produced in her other two strategies.

See, it's worth using a range of strategies to see what you can come up with.

Time for a quick check-in.

Annotations are useful when designing to, a explain ideas, b highlight positives/negatives and refer to design requirements, c create design fixation, or d identify opportunities.

Have a think, make your decision, and come back to me when you have decided.

Well done if you've got a, b, and d.

Annotations are useful when designing to explain ideas, to highlight positives/negatives and refer to design requirements, and to identify opportunities.

Izzy says, "I love features from ideas from each different strategy." Isn't that brilliant? So, the benefits of design strategies enable a multitude of innovative ideas, positive features from multiples that could be combined, just like Izzy's point, and lastly, it may spark off a completely new idea.

That is the exciting thing about generating ideas with a range of design strategies.

You just don't know what you might end up creating or coming up with that you might develop further on.

If you are struggling with a stressor or barrier, you should speak to any of the following, a trusted adult, a teacher, your school's SENDCO or a DSL, a designated safeguarding lead.

Please don't keep it to yourself.

Onto Task B.

Part 1, identify suitable design strategies for your design brief.

Part 2, explain the importance of annotations.

And lastly, part 3, use a variety of design strategies to generate 12 different design ideas for your design brief, which all avoid design fixation.

Good luck.

Come back to me when you've got some wonderful ideas.

Part 1, I asked you to identify suitable design strategies for your design brief.

Sofia says, "I chose to explore biomimicry for inspiration about the way that plants disperse seeds as I would like a product to slowly release relaxing aromas." Sam says, "I have chosen to share my design brief with a range of potential stakeholders and ask them to sketch ideas for me.

I will also use AI and I will use toy bricks to model quick 3D ideas.

This will help me to avoid design fixation and widen my ideas." Part 2, I asked you to explain the importance of annotations.

So annotating design ideas is important to explain how they work, identify strengths, weaknesses, and potential opportunities, to record primary user and stakeholder thoughts, and to analyze against design requirements.

Part 3, I asked you to use a variety of design strategies to generate 12 different design ideas for your design brief, which avoid design fixation.

Sam for her 12 designs, she chose to ask her stakeholders, her teachers, to sketch a few ideas, then use AI and toy bricks for quick 3D design ideas.

Through collaborative design, Sam identified a design that she had not thought of herself, which she annotated.

And this was the screen idea.

The screen creates privacy, allowing students to focus on revision where other people may be present.

It could have calming colors to help focus students.

And the screen can be clamped onto any surface or desk.

Well done, Sam.

This brings us to the end of our lesson today.

Let's summarize what we have found out.

Design strategies are methods of generating design ideas.

It is easy to become fixated on one design, so using a variety of strategies avoids design fixation, and opens up the exciting possibilities of successful, innovative solutions.

Primary user and/or stakeholder designing, collaborative designing, AI, biomimicry, and reverse engineering are examples of design strategies.

Annotating design ideas is important to explain how they work, to identify strengths, weaknesses, or perhaps potential opportunities, to record primary user and stakeholder thoughts and to analyze against design requirements.

If you feel that you may need some extra support, please visit NHS Live Well or the NHS website.

Thank you for all of your hard work in this lesson today.

You've done brilliantly and I look forward to seeing you in another lesson soon.

Take good care.

Bye, bye, bye.